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Creating Training Manuals
3:03 PM EDT 6/20/04
Hi,
I will be developing training for many areas: Millennium, our main library software, MS Office applications, and a slew of other things. Right now, I use MS Word to create my manuals. This is time consuming. I'd like to know how others do it. I've heard of buying manuals that you get online and you can cut and paste and put your own together. I don't want to waste a lot of paper, so I plan on having set manuals to learn in the Training Lab and then post them to our Intranet for people to reference or print out what they need. Any advice, thoughts, ways you do things are welcome. Thanks!
Stephanie
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Re: RE: Creating Training Manuals
12:28 PM EDT 10/22/05
as a reply to Janie Hermann.
I would def recommend using something other than Word for ANY sort of Desktop Publishing. It is MUCH easier to do layout and "rearrange" stuff and it is pretty easy to import text from Word if you already have the text typed up. The one "con" would be that not everyone has publisher so if you want it to be available on the Internet for anyone to read - you need to convert it to PDF. I have Acrobat Distiller installed so once I am finished with all the editing/changes I just go to "Print" and instead of choosing a printer - I choose Acrobat and BOOM! I have a PDF file of the document that anyone can read.
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Re: Creating Training Manuals
3:12 PM EST 11/15/05
as a reply to Stephanie Zimmerman.
I wholeheartedly agree with 'ereece' that anything is better than Word for layout and desktop publishing. I was a big fan of Adobe's Pagemaker, but haven't kept up with the evolution to InDesign. It's true that you'll need to convert your files to pdf's in order to share them with others. I'm going to put in a plug for the (absolutely) free pdf-converter that I discovered a while ago: [url http://www.primopdf.com/ ]PrimoPDF[/url]. It's been working for me just fine!
Stephanie, thanks for the update on your discovery! Can you give us an idea of how much the custom guides cost? I'm also very curious to know how you get Word to behave, since I find it so unruly --my graphics are always jumping all over the place, unless I leave them inline.
Great conversation!
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Re: Creating Training Manuals
7:48 AM EST 11/18/05
as a reply to Betha Gutsche.
I paid $2995.00 for the Professional Suite with Intranet Option. This means I can create manuals and redistribute to anyone I train from our 16 member libraries (I work for a Library System). The staff and volunteers can copy and use for themselves. The licence DOES NOT cover them using the materials to train the public. Each library would have to have their own license to do that, and a few of them are considering this now that I've been using this stuff for about a year. I put everything on the company Intranet by converting my Word manual to PDF and they have access to the Quick References too. If you just want to use their static copies without manipulation, you just load it onto the Intranet, easy as can be. It's been great! Also, you only pay 1/3 of the cost to renew per year. Oh, I got a nice non-profit discount for sure! We are currently in a free trial of their online courseware which is amazing and matches the manuals exactly. If we decide to purchase, it would be $1000 for 10 seats per year. 1000 people can be signed up but only 10 can use simultaneously. If enough people use it in the trial I may get it, but with a $5000/yr budget, they gotta be using it!
As for using Word, I use Styles a lot to help. For the graphics, I play around with Format Picture a lot, sometimes placing graphics in line with text, or squared, or to really have freedom use the In front of Text option. I also use hyperlinks like crazy and the automatic Table of Contents which is fabulous. I pretty much taught myself all this stuff using QUE literature : Special Edition Using MS Word 2003 - thick book, but great.
Hope this helps,
Stephanie
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